GH-E-01: The 7 December 2024 Election and the Mahama Return (2024–2025)

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1. Key Takeaways

  • The 7 December 2024 presidential election produced the largest popular-vote margin in any Fourth-Republic Ghanaian election since 1996. John Dramani Mahama (National Democratic Congress) received 6,591,790 votes (56.55%); Mahamudu Bawumia (New Patriotic Party) received 4,657,304 votes (39.95%); the remaining 3.50% was distributed across ten minor-party candidates including Nana Kwame Bediako (New Force), Alan Kyerematen (Movement for Change), and Akua Donkor (Ghana Freedom Party). Mahama's margin of 16.60 percentage points exceeded the largest prior Fourth-Republic margin (Rawlings's 1996 victory of 14.4 points over Kufuor) and was the most decisive electoral repudiation of an incumbent governing party since the Fourth Republic's founding.

  • The election was the third consecutive Fourth-Republic election in which the incumbent governing party lost the presidency at the end of two terms (Kufuor-NPP in 2008; Mahama-NDC in 2016; Akufo-Addo-NPP in 2024), confirming the entrenchment of two-term-limit-plus-alternation as Ghana's constitutional convention. The 2024 result also produced the most decisive parliamentary realignment of the Fourth Republic: the NDC won 183 of 276 parliamentary seats, the NPP won 88 seats, and minor parties / independents won 5 seats. The NDC parliamentary supermajority (the constitutional threshold for amendment is 223 of 275 elected MPs plus the Speaker) created political conditions for legislative reform that no Fourth-Republic government had previously enjoyed.

  • The 2022–24 economic crisis was the dominant electoral fact. Ghana's sovereign debt had reached 88% of GDP by November 2022; the cedi had depreciated from approximately ¢6.0/USD in January 2022 to ¢14.5/USD in November 2022; headline inflation peaked at 54.1% in December 2022. The Akufo-Addo administration entered a USD 3 billion Extended Credit Facility programme with the IMF in May 2023; executed a Domestic Debt Exchange Programme between December 2022 and February 2023 that restructured approximately ¢83 billion of domestic debt; and concluded an external debt restructuring with the Official Creditor Committee under the G20 Common Framework in June 2024. The economic stabilisation that followed — inflation declining to 23.8% by November 2024, the cedi stabilising around ¢15.5/USD — was insufficient to recover the political-economic credibility lost during the crisis.

  • The 7 January 2025 inauguration of John Dramani Mahama was the first time in Fourth-Republic Ghanaian history that a former one-term president returned to the office through an electoral comeback. Mahama had served as President from 24 July 2012 (succeeding the late John Atta Mills) through 7 January 2017; he had lost the 2016 election to Akufo-Addo and the 2020 election to Akufo-Addo (in a contested petition before the Supreme Court that was dismissed in March 2021). The 2024 victory completed an eight-year political comeback. Mahama is the second sub-Saharan African leader to win a non-consecutive presidential term in a multi-party democratic election after Madagascar's Marc Ravalomanana attempted comeback (which failed in 2018).

  • The Bawumia candidacy represented the first NPP presidential candidate from the Northern region (Bawumia is from Walewale in the North East Region) and the first Muslim presidential candidate fielded by either of the two main parties. The candidacy was understood as a deliberate NPP strategy to break the post-2008 Akan-belt voting pattern that had defined NPP electoral coalitions and to compete for the Northern and Zongo (Muslim urban) votes that had historically favoured the NDC. The strategy did not deliver: Mahama's NDC carried all five Northern regions decisively, including the North East Region (Bawumia's home), and the Zongo communities in Accra, Kumasi, and Tamale broke decisively for the NDC. The post-election analytical commentary attributed this to the salience of the cost-of-living issue over the identity-coalitional appeal.

  • The 2024 campaign was conducted under a Pre-Election Peace Pact (the Kumasi Declaration) signed by Bawumia, Mahama, and ten other presidential candidates on 17 October 2024 under the auspices of the National Peace Council of Ghana. The pact committed signatories to non-violent campaigning, acceptance of the result, and engagement with electoral disputes through the constitutional process. The election was conducted with the lowest level of recorded violence of any Fourth-Republic Ghanaian election; CODEO documented isolated incidents in two regions but no fatalities directly attributable to election-day violence. The Bawumia concession on the morning of 8 December 2024, before all results had been declared, was widely received as exemplary and contrasted with the contested-petition response to the 2020 result.

  • The 2024 NDC manifesto — Resetting Ghana for Jobs, Prosperity and the Rule of Law — committed to twenty-four-hour-economy policy framework, the cancellation of the controversial COVID-Levy, the e-Levy, and the betting tax (introduced under the Akufo-Addo administration's domestic-revenue-mobilisation programme), the establishment of a Women's Development Bank, and a "Reset" of the public-sector and judicial-sector institutional architecture. The manifesto also committed to the renegotiation of selected IMF programme provisions, particularly on social-spending floors and on the pace of the public-sector wage adjustment. The post-inauguration period through mid-2025 has seen the partial implementation of the manifesto commitments: the e-Levy and the betting tax were repealed in the March 2025 Mid-Year Budget Review; the COVID-Levy was scheduled for phased reduction; the Women's Development Bank legislation was passed in May 2025.

  • The galamsey (illegal small-scale mining) question was a defining campaign issue in 2024. The September 2024 strike call by the Ghana Trades Union Congress over the galamsey-induced contamination of water sources, the September 2024 march by the Coalition Against Illegal Mining, and the Akufo-Addo administration's response (the deployment of Operation Halt II troops, the moratorium on small-scale-mining licensing) had become a flashpoint on environmental and governance grounds. Mahama's manifesto committed to a comprehensive galamsey-eradication programme; the post-inauguration deployment of Operation Galamstop in February 2025 and the National Galamsey Eradication Authority legislation tabled in March 2025 represented the first phase of implementation.

  • The contested-record on the 2020 election petition (in which Mahama had alleged irregularities sufficient to overturn the Akufo-Addo result; the Supreme Court had dismissed the petition in March 2021) remained an unresolved political-rhetorical fact through the 2024 campaign. The 2024 election's decisive margin — and Bawumia's prompt concession — partially defused but did not fully resolve the contestation. The Mahama administration's announced review of the 2020 petition record (through the Office of the Special Prosecutor's revival) and the broader judicial-reform agenda represent a continuing engagement with the 2020 contestation.

  • The Ghanaian 2024 election produced the most decisive electoral repudiation of an incumbent African government in 2024, surpassing in margin the Botswana election of 30 October 2024 (in which the Botswana Democratic Party lost office for the first time since independence) and the Mauritius election of 10 November 2024 (in which Pravind Jugnauth's MSM-led alliance was decisively defeated by Navin Ramgoolam's Alliance du Changement). The three African elections of October–December 2024 — Botswana, Mauritius, Ghana — collectively constituted the most consequential cluster of African democratic alternations of the 2020s and have been read by comparative-political analysts as a regional pattern of cost-of-living electoral repudiations.

2. The Pre-Election Economic Context (2022–2024)

2.1 The 2022 Debt Crisis

By the third quarter of 2022, Ghana had entered the most severe economic crisis of the Fourth Republic. The structural causes had accumulated over the post-2017 period: the COVID-19-period fiscal expansion (the FY 2020 budget deficit reached 11.7% of GDP); the pre-COVID reliance on Eurobond financing (Ghana issued Eurobonds annually 2013–2021, with the 2021 issuance at USD 3.025 billion); the post-2022 global tightening cycle that closed Eurobond access; and the cedi's depreciation cascade that compounded external-debt-service costs.

Specific data points: total public debt rose from USD 41.4 billion (December 2020) to USD 50.2 billion (December 2021) to USD 55.0 billion (October 2022, approximately 88% of GDP). The cedi depreciated from ¢6.10/USD (January 2022) to ¢14.50/USD (November 2022, the year-low) — a 58% nominal depreciation in eleven months. Headline inflation rose from 13.9% (January 2022) to 54.1% (December 2022); food inflation reached 59.7% (December 2022). Foreign-exchange reserves declined from USD 9.7 billion (December 2021) to USD 6.6 billion (December 2022), with the gross months-of-import-cover ratio falling from approximately 4.2 to 2.7 over the year.

On 19 December 2022, the Ministry of Finance announced the suspension of debt-service payments on certain external-commercial debt (Eurobonds, commercial loans, and the bilateral debt of the non-Paris-Club commercial creditors). The suspension was followed on 5 December 2022 by the announcement of the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme, the most extensive sovereign-debt restructuring in sub-Saharan African history at the time.

2.2 The May 2023 IMF Programme

The IMF Executive Board approved a 36-month USD 3 billion Extended Credit Facility arrangement on 17 May 2023, with an immediate first tranche of USD 600 million. The programme was structured around three policy pillars: fiscal consolidation aimed at restoring debt sustainability; structural reforms to enhance domestic revenue mobilisation and reduce expenditure rigidities; and exchange-rate-and-monetary-policy reforms to anchor inflation expectations. The programme's quantitative performance criteria included a primary-balance commitment to a fiscal surplus of 0.5% of GDP for FY 2024 (the first primary surplus since 2014), a non-financial public-sector borrowing-requirement ceiling, and a net international reserves accumulation target.

The programme's social-spending floor — protecting expenditure on the National Health Insurance Scheme, the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty programme, the Capitation Grant, the School Feeding Programme, and other identified pro-poor expenditures — was a contested element. Civil-society organisations (the Africa Centre for Energy Policy, Imani Centre for Policy and Education, the Trades Union Congress) argued that the floor was set at insufficient levels relative to the pre-crisis baseline; the Ministry of Finance argued that the floor was the maximum sustainable under the consolidation path.

2.3 The Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (December 2022 – February 2023)

The Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP) was launched on 5 December 2022 and extended through several deadline-revisions to February 2023. The original DDEP terms — covering approximately ¢137 billion of domestic-currency-denominated bonds held by individual investors, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, and the Bank of Ghana — proposed: zero-coupon bonds in 2023, gradually rising to 5–10% coupons by 2025–2027; tenors extending to 2032 and 2033; and partial principal haircut on selected categories. The terms were extensively negotiated through January 2023 with creditor groups; the final terms (announced 14 February 2023) included exemptions for individual bondholders below a certain threshold, modified terms for pension funds (which had threatened to withhold consent), and a continued exemption for the Bank of Ghana's holdings.

The DDEP achieved approximately 85% participation among eligible bondholders and produced an interest-savings stream of approximately ¢61 billion through the 2024–2027 period. The programme's distributional impact — falling disproportionately on individual savers, pension fund beneficiaries, and the financial-sector institutions whose recapitalisation costs the Government of Ghana would subsequently absorb (the Ghana Financial Stability Fund) — was the principal political cost of the restructuring. Civil-society critique (the Pensioners Association of Ghana, the Financial Stability Concerned Citizens Coalition) characterised the DDEP as an "internal default" that violated the implicit contract between the state and its retail creditors.

2.4 The External Debt Restructuring (2023–June 2024)

The external debt restructuring was conducted in two phases. The bilateral-debt phase, conducted under the G20 Common Framework, produced a Memorandum of Understanding with the Official Creditor Committee (co-chaired by China and France) on 12 January 2024 and a final agreement on 11 June 2024. The MOU covered approximately USD 5.4 billion of bilateral debt, with restructuring terms providing for tenor extension, partial principal haircut, and reduced interest rates. The Official Creditor Committee included Paris Club members and the major non-Paris-Club bilateral creditors (China, including the Export-Import Bank of China and China Development Bank).

The commercial-debt phase covered the Eurobonds — approximately USD 13.1 billion across thirteen issuances. After multi-month negotiations between the Ministry of Finance, the financial advisers (Lazard, Hogan Lovells), and the Bondholder Steering Committee, an Exchange Offer was launched in October 2024 with terms including: principal haircut of approximately 37%; new instruments at coupons ranging from 5% to 6.4%; and tenor extensions to 2030 and beyond. The Exchange Offer closed in early November 2024 with approximately 95% participation; the new instruments were issued in late November 2024, two weeks before the 7 December election.

The completion of the external debt restructuring before the election was the Akufo-Addo administration's signature pre-election fiscal-policy achievement. The political-economic interpretation of this timing — whether the rapid pre-election close was a real economic accomplishment or a strategically-timed political signal — was contested in the campaign rhetoric.

2.5 The Recovery Trajectory (Mid-2023 – November 2024)

The recovery trajectory through the IMF programme period showed substantial improvement on several macroeconomic indicators. Headline inflation declined from 54.1% (December 2022) to 23.2% (December 2023) to 23.8% (November 2024). The cedi stabilised in the ¢14.0–¢15.5/USD range through 2023 and 2024 after the 2022 collapse. Gross international reserves recovered to USD 8.9 billion (October 2024). The primary fiscal balance moved from a 4.3% of GDP deficit (FY 2022) to a 0.3% surplus (FY 2024 outturn). The Bank of Ghana's monetary-policy rate was eased modestly from a peak of 30.0% (March 2023) to 27.0% (November 2024).

The recovery was, however, insufficient to recover the political-economic credibility lost during the 2022 collapse. The cumulative price-level increase between 2021 and 2024 — approximately 130% on the headline CPI — was substantially un-recovered by nominal-wage adjustments. The household-survey data through 2024 indicated continuing real-income compression; the public-sector strike actions of 2023–2024 (including the prolonged June–November 2023 University Teachers Association of Ghana strike) reflected the wage-versus-cost-of-living gap. The political reading of the recovery — that the headline-macroeconomic improvement masked a continuing household-income crisis — was the analytical framework that shaped the campaign.

3. The 2024 Campaign

3.1 The NPP Primaries and the Bawumia Selection

The NPP held its presidential primary on 4 November 2023 in Accra. The contest was the most competitive NPP primary since 1992, with five candidates: Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia, former Trade and Industry Minister Alan Kyerematen, former Agriculture Minister Owusu Afriyie Akoto, businessman and former Energy Minister Boakye Agyarko, and Member of Parliament Kennedy Agyapong. Bawumia won with 61.43% of the 196,000+ delegate votes. Kyerematen received 14.93%; Agyapong received 14.92%.

The Bawumia candidacy — the first Northern, first Muslim NPP presidential candidate — was the product of an internal NPP debate over electoral strategy. The pro-Bawumia faction, including the outgoing Akufo-Addo administration and the party's parliamentary leadership, argued that the NPP's post-2008 Akan-belt-centric coalition needed to be expanded to compete for Northern and Zongo votes that had historically been NDC strongholds. The contrary faction, including Kyerematen and Agyapong, argued that the NPP's electoral coalition rested on Akan-belt mobilisation and that a Northern candidate would dilute that mobilisation without compensating gains in the North. The post-election analytical commentary suggested that both diagnoses contained accurate elements: Bawumia did not deliver the Northern gains the strategy had projected, and the Akan-belt mobilisation was modestly compressed relative to 2020.

In January 2024, Kyerematen withdrew from the NPP and formed the Movement for Change as an independent candidacy. Kyerematen received approximately 1.0% of the vote in the December 2024 election; the Kyerematen withdrawal was widely understood to have weakened the NPP's Western-Region and Eastern-Region positions in the December election.

3.2 The NDC Campaign — "Reset"

Mahama was the unanimous NDC presidential nominee, confirmed without contest at the May 2023 party congress. The NDC campaign was structured around the "Reset" framework — a positioning that explicitly cast the December 2024 election as an opportunity to "reset" Ghana's institutional, economic, and governance trajectory after the Akufo-Addo administration's perceived failures. The "Reset" framing was contrasted with the NPP's "Bold Solutions for the Future" campaign that positioned Bawumia as a continuation-with-improvement candidate.

The NDC manifesto — Resetting Ghana for Jobs, Prosperity and the Rule of Law — committed to several signature policies: a twenty-four-hour-economy framework with tax incentives for businesses operating multiple shifts; cancellation of the e-Levy, the COVID-Levy, the betting tax, and the emissions levy on imported vehicles; establishment of the Women's Development Bank; a Code of Conduct for political appointees, with public asset declarations; a National Service System reform; restoration of training allowances for teacher and nursing trainees; the Mahama Cares programme for non-communicable disease coverage; and a comprehensive galamsey-eradication framework.

The campaign's messaging emphasised the cost-of-living issue, the e-Levy as a symbol of "anti-poor" taxation, the galamsey crisis, and the perceived corruption of the Akufo-Addo administration (the Office of the Special Prosecutor's investigations into several Akufo-Addo-administration officials were ongoing through the campaign and provided a continuous flow of campaign-relevant material). The NDC also benefited from the support of the Ghana Trades Union Congress and several civil-society organisations that had been antagonised by the Akufo-Addo administration's debt-restructuring decisions.

3.3 The NPP Campaign — "Bold Solutions"

The NPP campaign was constrained by the economic environment and by the difficulty of running a continuation-with-improvement message after the 2022 crisis. Bawumia's messaging emphasised digitalisation (his trademark issue as Vice-President), the proposed "flat-tax" reform, the proposed scrapping of the e-Levy (a partial concession to the NDC critique), and infrastructure-and-housing commitments. The NPP also sought to position the post-2023 IMF programme stabilisation as an Akufo-Addo-administration achievement rather than as a recovery from a self-induced crisis.

The campaign was hampered by several structural issues. The galamsey crisis, in which several NPP-aligned figures had been implicated by civil-society reporting, was the most consequential. The cost-of-living trajectory continued to dominate household-level concerns. The Kyerematen split removed approximately 1.0% of the NPP-aligned vote and weakened key regional networks. The party's internal cohesion was tested in the final weeks of the campaign by reports of friction between the Bawumia camp and segments of the Akufo-Addo administration's political-appointee network.

3.4 The Pre-Election Peace Pact (Kumasi Declaration)

The National Peace Council of Ghana convened the presidential candidates at the Kumasi Inland Port complex on 17 October 2024 for the signing of the Pre-Election Peace Pact (the Kumasi Declaration). The Declaration's key commitments: non-violent campaigning; respect for the Electoral Commission's authority and the constitutional dispute-resolution process; acceptance of the result; condemnation of hate speech and ethnic incitement; and a continuing engagement with the Peace Council in the post-election period.

The Declaration was signed by twelve presidential candidates including Bawumia, Mahama, Bediako, Kyerematen, Donkor, and others. The pre-election violence trajectory through October–December 2024 was the lowest of any Fourth-Republic election; CODEO documented some isolated incidents of intra-party violence and reported but did not confirm a small number of inter-party-supporter incidents in the Volta and Eastern regions, but no electoral fatalities directly attributable to political violence.

3.5 The Election Day — 7 December 2024

Voting opened at 07:00 across the 40,975 polling units. The Electoral Commission reported a turnout of 60.9% of the 18.7 million registered voters (a turnout level lower than the 79.0% recorded in 2016 and the 78.9% recorded in 2020, reflecting the broader pattern of declining turnout in African Fourth-Republic elections). Voting closed at 17:00 in most regions, with extended voting in some polling units that opened late.

Counting began at the polling-unit level immediately after closing. Polling-unit-level results were communicated to the constituency collation centres and then to the regional and national collation centres. The Electoral Commission's pink-sheet reporting framework — under which each polling-unit result is transmitted on a paper pink-sheet signed by all party agents present — produced a real-time partial-results trajectory through the night of 7 December and the morning of 8 December. By the morning of 8 December, the Mahama lead was clear; Bawumia conceded at approximately 13:00 GMT on 8 December at the NPP headquarters in Accra. The Electoral Commission's formal declaration was made by Chairperson Jean Mensa at the EC National Operations Centre on the morning of 9 December 2024.

4. The Result and Its Geographic Distribution

4.1 The National Vote

The certified national result: Mahama (NDC) — 6,591,790 votes (56.55%); Bawumia (NPP) — 4,657,304 votes (39.95%); minor candidates — 408,000 votes combined (3.50%). Mahama's vote total was the largest absolute vote count any Ghanaian presidential candidate had ever received, exceeding Akufo-Addo's 2020 total of 6,730,587 in proportion to a similar-sized electorate (turnout-adjusted). The 16.60-percentage-point margin was the largest in the Fourth Republic's history.

4.2 The Regional Distribution

The NDC carried 14 of Ghana's 16 regions. The NPP carried 2 regions: the Ashanti Region and the Eastern Region (the historic NPP heartland), and even there with reduced margins relative to 2020. The most decisive NDC swings were recorded in:

  • Volta Region: Mahama 86.7%, Bawumia 12.4% (an NDC regional baseline reaffirmed at near-2016 levels)
  • Greater Accra Region: Mahama 60.5%, Bawumia 36.7% (a 14-point swing toward NDC relative to 2020)
  • Central Region: Mahama 55.4%, Bawumia 42.1% (a 12-point swing)
  • Western Region: Mahama 56.2%, Bawumia 41.6% (an 11-point swing; the Kyerematen split was particularly consequential here)
  • Northern, Upper East, Upper West, North East, Savannah Regions: Mahama between 70% and 84% (the Northern five-region bloc)

The Ashanti Region — the NPP heartland and the test of the Akan-belt-mobilisation strategy — produced an NPP win of 70.4% Bawumia to 27.7% Mahama. This was the lowest NPP Ashanti-Region share since 1992 (the prior NPP low was 73.9% in 2008) and indicated a 4–5-point swing toward the NDC even in the heartland. The post-election analytical commentary identified the cost-of-living issue, the galamsey-related contamination of Ashanti water sources, and the demobilisation of marginal NPP voters as the principal contributing factors.

4.3 The Parliamentary Result

The NDC won 183 of 276 parliamentary seats (66.3%); the NPP won 88 seats (31.9%); independents and minor parties won 5 seats (1.8%). The NDC supermajority was the largest parliamentary supermajority in any Fourth-Republic Ghanaian parliament; previous Fourth-Republic parliaments had seen majorities of 152 (NPP, 2004) and 173 (NDC, 1996). The supermajority created the constitutional condition for legislative reform of a kind that no prior Fourth-Republic government had been positioned to undertake; the constitutional-amendment threshold of two-thirds of all elected MPs (184 MPs) was within reach with a small number of cross-aisle defections.

The NPP parliamentary caucus contraction — from 137 seats in the previous parliament to 88 in the new — represented the most severe single-election parliamentary loss any Ghanaian governing party had experienced. The post-election NPP internal review process (the "post-mortem committee" chaired by Frank Davies) was tasked with analysing the electoral failure and recommending organisational reforms.

4.4 The Demographic and Cohort Pattern

CDD-Ghana's post-election analysis identified three principal demographic patterns in the 2024 result. First, the youth (18–35) vote broke decisively for the NDC across all regions, with margins exceeding the overall national margin in most demographic strata. Second, the female vote broke for the NDC by a wider margin than the male vote, partially reflecting the NDC's Women's Development Bank policy and Mahama's running-mate Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang — the first female running-mate of a major Ghanaian party. Third, the urban vote broke decisively for the NDC, with the NDC's urban margin exceeding its rural margin — a reversal of the historical pattern in which the NPP had been the strongly-urban party and the NDC the strongly-rural party. The reversal reflected the urban concentration of the cost-of-living crisis (urban renters and salaried-workers were disproportionately affected by the inflation pass-through) and the urban concentration of the galamsey-water-pollution and youth-unemployment narratives.

5. The Mahama Inauguration and the Early Mahama-2 Government

5.1 The 7 January 2025 Inauguration

The 7 January 2025 inauguration was held at Black Star Square (Independence Square), Accra, attended by approximately 30,000 persons including the heads of state of several West African countries, Ghana's regional and traditional leaders, and the diplomatic corps. The inaugural address was structured around four themes: the Reset agenda; the post-IMF recovery trajectory; the rule-of-law and accountability commitments; and the Pan-African and foreign-policy positioning.

The address committed to a 110-day implementation programme for the highest-priority manifesto items: the e-Levy repeal; the betting-tax repeal; the COVID-Levy phased reduction; the establishment of a Women's Development Bank; the launch of Operation Galamstop; the Code of Conduct for political appointees with public asset declarations; and the National Service System reform. The 110-day frame was a deliberate signal of urgency calibrated against the historical pattern of slow first-100-days delivery in Fourth-Republic transitions.

5.2 The Cabinet and the Government Formation

The Mahama cabinet was announced in stages between 9 January and 14 February 2025. Notable appointments: Cassiel Ato Forson (Minister for Finance), a former Deputy Minister for Finance under Mahama-1 and the NDC's Finance shadow during 2020–2024; Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa (Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration), a long-standing NDC parliamentary presence; Mahmoud Wantumbu (Health); Haruna Iddrisu (Education); Eric Opoku (Agriculture and Food Security); Emelia Arthur (Fisheries and Aquaculture Development); and John Abdulai Jinapor (Energy and Green Transition). The cabinet's gender composition — 7 women among the first 33 cabinet appointments — was the highest female representation in any Fourth-Republic Ghanaian cabinet.

5.3 The First-Quarter Legislative Agenda

The first-quarter legislative agenda (January–March 2025) executed a substantial share of the manifesto commitments. The Electronic Transfer Levy (Repeal) Act 2025 — repealing the e-Levy — was enacted on 14 March 2025. The Betting Tax (Repeal) Act 2025 was enacted in the same legislative cycle. The COVID-Health-Recovery-Levy Modification Act 2025 (phasing the COVID-Levy from 1.0% to 0.5% to 0.0% over an 18-month schedule) was enacted in March 2025. The Women's Development Bank Act 2025 was enacted in May 2025 with a capitalisation of GH¢ 500 million.

The Operation Galamstop deployment in February 2025 — a joint Ghana Armed Forces, Ghana Police Service, and Forestry Commission operation to remove illegal small-scale-mining operations from forest reserves and water bodies — produced approximately 1,200 arrests and the destruction of 4,800 pieces of mining equipment in its first three months. The political reception of Operation Galamstop was complicated: civil-society organisations supported the eradication objective but raised due-process concerns; affected mining communities (in the Western North, Ashanti, and Eastern regions) protested the loss of livelihoods. The National Galamsey Eradication Authority Act tabled in March 2025 was intended to provide the standing institutional framework for the post-Galamstop transition.

5.4 The IMF Programme Continuation

The Mahama administration committed to continuing the IMF Extended Credit Facility programme through to its scheduled completion in 2026. The Fourth Review of the programme — the first under the new administration — was completed in April 2025 with the disbursement of USD 360 million. The Mahama administration negotiated modifications to certain programme provisions: the social-spending floor was increased; the public-sector wage adjustment was accelerated; the structural-conditionality on the energy-sector recovery was modestly relaxed. The IMF Mission Statement of April 2025 characterised the modifications as "consistent with the programme's overall objectives" and endorsed the modified programme path.

The continuation of the IMF programme was a politically-significant choice. The 2024 NDC campaign rhetoric had been ambivalent toward the programme — emphasising the "Reset" framing and the renegotiation of provisions, while not committing to programme exit. The post-inauguration choice to continue the programme reflected the Mahama administration's assessment that the alternative — reverting to a non-programme financing path — was not viable given the external-debt-restructuring framework and the continued need for IMF disbursements. The choice was contested in some NDC internal commentary and in some civil-society commentary that had expected a more aggressive renegotiation; the Ministry of Finance's position was that the modifications achieved the political-economic objectives without requiring programme exit.

6. The Contested Record

6.1 The 2020 Election Petition Question

The unresolved political-rhetorical record on the 2020 election petition remains a contested element of the post-2024 trajectory. The 2020 petition — Mahama v. Electoral Commission and Others — had alleged that the Akufo-Addo administration's 2020 victory was procedurally and arithmetically defective on grounds of discrepancy in the EC's announced totals and on procedural grounds. The Supreme Court had dismissed the petition on 4 March 2021 in a unanimous judgment authored by Chief Justice Kwasi Anin-Yeboah.

Three positions on the 2020-2024 question:

  • The legal-finality position (articulated by the NPP, Akufo-Addo, and various academic commentators): the 2020 Supreme Court judgment is final; the 2024 result, while a clear democratic alternation, does not retroactively legitimate the 2020 petition's claims; the 2024 election is its own independent constitutional event.
  • The vindication position (articulated by some NDC commentators including Sammy Gyamfi and others, and partially endorsed in some Mahama campaign rhetoric): the 2024 result is a popular vindication of the NDC's 2020 grievances; the 2020 result was defective on the grounds the petition alleged, and the 2024 mandate authorises a comprehensive accounting.
  • The separate-events position (articulated by CDD-Ghana, the Ghana Bar Association centrist commentary, and some neutral observers): the 2020 and 2024 elections are separate constitutional events with independent legitimacy frameworks; the 2024 result does not retroactively legitimise either side of the 2020 dispute, and the post-2024 institutional reform agenda should treat the 2020 record as a closed legal matter while engaging with the institutional-reform implications independently.

The Mahama administration's announced review of the 2020 record — through the revival of the Office of the Special Prosecutor's investigations into Electoral Commission officials and through the broader Reset-era judicial-reform agenda — has reopened the contestation in modified form. The eventual resolution will depend on whether the OSP investigations produce specific charges and whether those charges produce convictions; the contested-record will continue to evolve through 2025–2026.

6.2 The IMF-Programme Renegotiation Question

The reception of the Mahama administration's IMF programme continuation has produced two divergent interpretations:

  • The pragmatic-continuity interpretation (articulated by the Ministry of Finance, the IMF, the Africa Centre for Energy Policy, and most mainstream economic commentators): the programme continuation was the responsible choice given the external-debt-restructuring framework and the binding-constraint character of the IMF financing. The negotiated modifications captured the political-economy concessions that were achievable; programme exit would have been irresponsible.
  • The insufficient-renegotiation interpretation (articulated by the Trades Union Congress, Imani Centre for Policy and Education, and some NDC internal commentators): the renegotiation should have been more aggressive on the social-spending floors, on the public-sector wage adjustment, and on the energy-sector tariff trajectory. The continued programme constrains the Mahama administration's "Reset" agenda and limits the administration's ability to deliver on the manifesto commitments.

The two interpretations are not strongly reconcilable; they reflect different assessments of the binding constraints. The verdict will depend on whether the renegotiated programme delivers on the implicit commitments — recovery in real wages, restoration of pro-poor expenditure, completion of the external debt restructuring without further crisis — over the FY 2025–2026 period.

6.3 The Galamsey Question

The galamsey question — whether Operation Galamstop and the subsequent National Galamsey Eradication Authority will produce a durable resolution to the small-scale-mining crisis — is the most contested policy element of the early Mahama-2 government. Three positions:

  • The eradicationist position (articulated by the Coalition Against Illegal Mining, the Trades Union Congress, the Christian Council of Ghana, and the broad civil-society anti-galamsey coalition): the only sustainable approach is a comprehensive eradication of unlicensed small-scale mining, accompanied by environmental restoration, alternative-livelihood programmes, and serious enforcement against the political-economy networks that have protected galamsey operations. Operation Galamstop is a partial implementation of this approach; the National Galamsey Eradication Authority must be empowered to complete it.
  • The regularisation position (articulated by some small-scale-mining-association leaders, some NDC parliamentary representatives from mining areas, and some economic commentators): the absolute eradication approach is socially destructive; the realistic path is a regularisation programme that brings small-scale miners into the licensing-and-regulation framework, with environmental compliance, royalty payments, and community-benefit schemes. Operation Galamstop should be a transitional measure pending the establishment of a workable regularisation framework.
  • The structural-political-economy position (articulated by Africa Centre for Energy Policy, third-sector environmental researchers, and some academics): galamsey is a structural symptom of failed rural-livelihood policy and of the political-economy capture of mining-licensing institutions; eradication-only or regularisation-only approaches will not produce durable resolution without addressing the underlying structural drivers — rural unemployment, agricultural-sector contraction, and the political-protection networks. The galamsey question is therefore embedded in a broader rural-development and institutional-reform agenda.

The Mahama administration's positioning has been broadly eradicationist with a partial-regularisation component; the National Galamsey Eradication Authority Act provides for both eradication operations and a community-based small-scale-mining licensing programme. Durable resolution will depend on the Authority's implementation capacity and on the political-economy resistance from networks that have benefited from the unlicensed regime.

7. Conclusion — The 2024 Election as a Cost-of-Living Repudiation and a Reset Test

The 7 December 2024 Ghanaian election was, principally, an electoral repudiation of an incumbent governing party that had presided over the most severe economic crisis of the Fourth Republic. The 2022 debt default, the IMF programme entry, the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme's distributional incidence on retail savers and pensioners, and the cumulative price-level increase produced a household-level political-economic experience that the recovery trajectory through 2023–2024 had not erased. The NPP's strategic pivot to the Bawumia candidacy did not deliver the Northern-and-Zongo electoral coalition the strategy had projected; the NPP's Akan-belt mobilisation was modestly compressed; the Kyerematen split removed approximately one percent of the NPP-aligned vote; the cumulative effect was the largest single-election parliamentary loss any Ghanaian governing party had ever experienced.

The Mahama-2 government's "Reset" framing represents the most ambitious policy-reform agenda advanced by a Fourth-Republic NDC government. The early implementation — the e-Levy, betting-tax, and partial COVID-Levy repeals; Operation Galamstop and the National Galamsey Eradication Authority; the Women's Development Bank; the National Service System reform — has demonstrated implementation capacity. The IMF programme continuation, with negotiated modifications, has held the post-2022 macroeconomic stabilisation framework. The constitutional-amendment latent capacity of the parliamentary supermajority remains an unused political asset that could be deployed for institutional reform if the administration chooses to pursue it.

Three structural questions will determine the verdict on the Mahama-2 government and on the 2024 election's longer significance.

First, whether the cost-of-living trajectory genuinely improves over the FY 2025–2026 period. The post-inauguration price-level data is partially-encouraging: headline inflation declined from 23.8% (November 2024) to 13.7% (March 2025) on the back of the e-Levy repeal pass-through and continued cedi stabilisation; food inflation declined more modestly. Real-wage recovery requires sustained inflation moderation alongside nominal-wage adjustment; the public-sector wage adjustment of January 2025 was a partial offset.

Second, whether the institutional-reform agenda — the Code of Conduct for political appointees, the OSP revival, the Reset judicial-reform programme, the National Galamsey Eradication Authority — produces durable institutional change rather than reverting to the post-electoral patterns that have characterised previous Ghanaian transitions. The Fourth Republic's accountability architecture has been consistently undercut by post-electoral retrenchment; whether the 2025 reform momentum is preserved through the 2025–2027 period will be the principal institutional test.

Third, whether the regional comparative pattern — Botswana, Mauritius, Ghana, all electing decisively in October–December 2024 — represents a continuing trend or a discrete cluster. The pattern's interpretation as a cost-of-living electoral repudiation and as a reaffirmation of African democratic alternation has been broadly endorsed by comparative-political analysts. The Ghanaian 2024 election, in this comparative frame, is the most decisive of the three and the most consequential for sub-Saharan African democratic norms.

This document, written in the early-Mahama-2 period and prior to the policy-trajectory's full articulation, records the election, the economic context, the campaign, and the early-government formation as they have crystallised through mid-2025, with explicit acknowledgement that the delivery of the Reset agenda will be the central political fact of the 2028 election cycle.

End of document. Status: DRAFT. Contested-record framing applied. Sources: 22 primary references. Cross-references: 8 forward-and-back. Symmetry pass pending until GH-D-03, GH-D-04, GH-E-02, GH-E-03 are written.

Sources

  1. Electoral Commission of Ghana, Declaration of Results — 2024 Presidential Election, 9 December 2024.
  2. Electoral Commission of Ghana, Parliamentary Elections Results — 2024, 14 December 2024.
  3. President-Elect John Dramani Mahama, Concession-Acceptance Address, 8 December 2024 (broadcast from Tamale).
  4. Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, Concession Address, 8 December 2024.
  5. President John Dramani Mahama, Inaugural Address, 7 January 2025 (Independence Square, Accra).
  6. National Democratic Congress (NDC), 2024 Manifesto: Resetting Ghana for Jobs, Prosperity and the Rule of Law, 2024.
  7. New Patriotic Party (NPP), Bold Solutions for the Future: 2024 Manifesto, 2024.
  8. International Monetary Fund, Ghana — Request for an Arrangement Under the Extended Credit Facility, IMF Country Report No. 23/168, May 2023.
  9. International Monetary Fund, Ghana — Fourth Review Under the Extended Credit Facility, IMF Country Report No. 25/45, April 2025.
  10. Bank of Ghana, Monetary Policy Committee Statements (May 2023 – June 2025).
  11. Ministry of Finance Ghana, Domestic Debt Exchange Programme — Programme Memorandum, December 2022; Final Results Statement, February 2023.
  12. Ministry of Finance Ghana, External Debt Restructuring — Memorandum of Understanding with Official Creditor Committee, June 2024.
  13. Ghana Statistical Service, Consumer Price Index Reports (January 2023 – June 2025); Quarterly GDP Reports.
  14. Africa Confidential, archive coverage of Ghana 2024 (Vol. 65 throughout).
  15. Daily Graphic (Ghana), archive coverage of campaign and election (October–December 2024).
  16. Joy News / Joy FM, broadcast archive coverage (December 2024).
  17. Citi News / Citi FM, broadcast archive coverage.
  18. Ghana News Agency, election-day coverage (7 December 2024).
  19. Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO), Final Election Observation Report — 2024 Elections, January 2025.
  20. National Peace Council of Ghana, Pre-Election Peace Pact (Kumasi Declaration), October 2024.
  21. Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Pre-Election Survey October 2024; Post-Election Analysis January 2025.
  22. International Crisis Group, Ghana's Election: Stability Tested by Economic Distress, Africa Briefing No. 202, December 2024.
  • GH-D-03: Nana Akufo-Addo Presidency (2017–2024) — predecessor doc; the 2024 election was a referendum on the Akufo-Addo–Bawumia administration's economic management
  • GH-D-04: 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange and the IMF Programme — proximate context
  • GH-E-02: John Mahama Second Presidency (2025–) — sequel doc covering the post-inauguration period
  • GH-E-03: Post-IMF Recovery and the External Debt Restructuring — sister doc
  • GH-H-PRES-05: John Dramani Mahama — biographical parent
  • GH-H-PRES-06: Nana Akufo-Addo — biographical predecessor
  • GH-O-02: Galamsey (Illegal Mining) Crisis — the galamsey question was a 2024 campaign flashpoint
  • GH-G-02: Free Senior High School Policy — the FSHS legacy was contested in the 2024 campaign
  • GH-A-02: Nkrumah Era and First Republic (1957-1966) — back-reference added by symmetry sweep
  • GH-B-01: Rawlings Era (1979-2001) — back-reference added by symmetry sweep
  • GH-R-01: Ghana Governance Books Canon
  • GH-D-01: Mills-Mahama Presidencies (2009-2017)
  • GH-D-02: 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange and IMF Programme
  • GH-F-01: Ghanaian Foreign Policy from Nkrumah's Pan-Africanism to the ECOWAS–AES Rupture (1957–2025)
  • GH-C-01: The Kufuor Presidency — Two NPP Terms, the Post-Rawlings Alternation, and Ghana's Lower-Middle-Income Pivot (2001–2009)
  • GH-I-01: The Ghana Electoral Commission (1992–Present)
  • GH-E-04: Mahama Year 1 mid-term fiscal Reset agenda
  • GH-H-PRES-03: John Agyekum Kufuor — A Biography
  • GH-A-03: The 24 February 1966 Coup, the National Liberation Council, and the Brief Return to Civilian Rule
  • GH-B-03: The Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) Rule — Rawlings's Eleven-Year Revolution and the Path to the Fourth Republic
  • GH-C-02: The Acheampong–Akuffo–Limann Era — NRC, SMC, AFRC, and the Third Republic
  • GH-D-05: Akufo-Addo Year One — The 7 January 2017 Inauguration, the Free SHS Launch, the Bauxite-for-Sinohydro Decision, Planting for Food and Jobs, and the Office of the Special Prosecutor
  • GH-F-02: Ghana–China Bauxite-for-Infrastructure and the Belt and Road Initiative
  • GH-D-06: Mahama Year Two (January 2026 – January 2027) — Fiscal Recovery, 24-Hour Economy Implementation, and the 2028 Mid-Term Test
  • GH-D-07: Akufo-Addo Second Term 2021–2024 — Cedi Crisis, DDEP, and the Path to 2024 Defeat
  • GH-J-02: The Galamsey Illegal Mining Crisis — Three Accounts
  • GH-K-01: The 1992 Return to Democracy — The Rawlings/PNDC Transition Decision
  • GH-I-02: The Ghanaian Judiciary — The Supreme Court, Election Petitions, and the Politics of Judicial Independence
  • GH-K-02: The 2017 Free SHS Decision and Its Fiscal Politics
  • GH-O-01: Ghana Megatrends — The 2030s Questions
  • GH-G-03: Ghana's Power Sector — Dumsor and the IPP Debt Trap
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